Natasha (45 page)

Natalie secured Redford as her leading man and flew to Caracas that June to meet Blatnik’s parents and consider moving to Venezuela, an experience that cooled her romance with him and caused her to delay their wedding until Christmas.

When she returned from Caracas, Natalie addressed the problem of who would direct her Tennessee Williams movie, which was scheduled to begin in October. As Redford reconstructs, “They were running down through the director’s lists and they were down to the bottom, and I started to panic. Because I wanted to do the film, and I wanted to work with
her
again, but it was a mess, it needed somebody to straighten it out, and the top directors were turning it down.”

Natalie, who had contractual rights to approve her director, costars, and virtually everything else, discussed it with Redford, who suggested a “completely unknown” Sydney Pollack, an actor he had worked with in a 1962 film called
War Hunt
. Since they acted together, Pollack had directed a few television shows and
The Slender Thread
. Redford recommended Pollack to Natalie “as self-preservation, as much as anything, because I liked him. We were the same sensibility, young guys roughly the same age. I just liked his sensibility. He had been trained in New York, and I just thought we’d have a better shot with this.”

Redford did a desperate selling job on Natalie. “She said, ‘Who is Sydney Pollack?’ I said, ‘Oh! Hey listen! This guy is so hot! If you can
get this guy—if you’re
lucky
enough to get him—he’s the hot new guy.’ Which he wasn’t, right? He was just my friend.” A few days later, Redford heard from an astonished Sydney Pollack, “saying, ‘Bob, what are you doin’? I got a call from Natalie Wood!’ He says, ‘What am I gonna do? My palms are sweating.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t shake hands when you go in to meet her. Keep your hands in your pocket!’”

Pollack, who had had a crush on Natalie since
West Side Story
, was sent to her house on Bentley, arranged by Joe Schoenfeld, their mutual agent. “I was very nervous. I didn’t know how a director was supposed to ‘audition.’ I remember she lived in a house that was built on a slope, and you went downstairs to the living room, and it was sort of off-beige and very luxurious, and I remember thinking, ‘God, this is all very impressive, very movie-starrish.’ The lady that worked for her asked if I wanted a drink… and Natalie came down looking absolutely incredible, and she was very, very sweet. She made it easy. She was very anxious to find out what I thought about the script, how I thought it might be improved.”

Pollack was added to the list of people who would credit Natalie for giving them their first break. He checked into a motel in San Jose with eleven versions of the screenplay, “cutting and pasting,” emerging two days later with a mock-up final script.

The filming of
This Property Is Condemned
, beginning that October in the Deep South, was intense for Natalie, who had Blatnik with her in Mississippi. “We all knew it was a challenge for her creatively,” reveals Pollack. “It was a Tennessee Williams heroine, and it had a certain kind of creative level that’s required.” Redford found Natalie as committed to Alva as she had been to Daisy, doing careful work to create a Southern character and an accent with nuances. “She was gonna go for it. She allowed Sydney to really
work
with her… she was very willing to take chances.”

In a difficult sequence where Alva gets drunk and seduces her mother’s boyfriend, Pollack suggested Natalie have some wine before she shot the scene. “I don’t necessarily believe in tricks like that, but in this case, I thought it worked very well. She had two glasses of wine and it just took the edge off.” Natalie later considered
This Property Is Condemned
some of her best work.

Emotionally, Natalie was dancing on the edge of a cliff, trying to keep herself from falling off. She abruptly canceled her Christmas wedding to Ladislao Blatnik over Thanksgiving, when the movie company
returned to Hollywood to film. Maria’s friend Shirley Moore recalls someone (probably Mud) hiring “a lot of spies to check up on him, and when they found out when or what he really was, Natalie got rid of him quick.” Edd Byrnes heard, at the time, that Blatnik was receiving money from friends in South America “to keep on romancing Natalie and play the game, sponsoring him to marry this movie star.” Marion Picciotto, who married the playboy “Ladi” in 1972, had no idea why Natalie and Blatnik, an eventual suicide, called off their wedding. “Better a long engagement than a short marriage,” Natalie gamely told columnists.

Privately in deep despair, Natalie went through daily psychoanalysis with Dr. Lindon. Pollack remembers “seeing her blue Mercedes dart away at lunchtime, and come back afterwards, and the back of her dress would be all wrinkled from lying down on the couch.” He knew “she worried about being an actress and being single and getting to be thirty years old and not having a child… she wanted children badly.”

At Christmas, Natalie suffered a blow when early reviews of
Inside Daisy Clover
came out prior to its February release. Critics praised the performances but demeaned the picture as a “failure,” a “not-bad idea gone wrong,” diminishing Natalie’s hopes that her poignant portrayal of Daisy would lead to the Oscar she needed to validate her artistic talent, and wanted as the ultimate symbol of stardom.

Pollack soothed his leading lady through the remaining weeks of
This Property Is Condemned
. Thirty-three years later, with the wisdom of experience, he would say:

During the Christmas season, Natalie lost her long-time secretary, Mona Clark, who got married. She replaced her with an affable Englishman named Tony Costello, the son of her live-in housekeeper of several years, Frances Helen McKeating, whom she called “Mac.” Costello joined his mother at Natalie’s mansion, coincidentally ushering a “British” phase into her life. That December, she was introduced to Michael Caine, who took her on a few casual dates, a diversion from her increasing depression.

Natalie’s deepest emotional connection was with the solidly married Sydney Pollack, who plainly “adored” her, recalls her secretary-in-residence, Costello. When filming on
This Property Is Condemned
came to an end toward late January, Natalie no longer had the character of Alva to inhabit, or Pollack and her movie family to provide emotional support, leaving her alone with her demons.

“I was aware that something very bad happened, just right before I was to do the dubbing, where you come in and do the looping of the voice for the picture,” remembers Pollack. “Because there was a period of time when I was not able to reach her to try to schedule this. I knew that something had happened, I knew she’d been hospitalized. And there was a rumor around that she’d taken some pills… I heard from her girlfriend, who was Norma Crane, that she had been very upset. I didn’t ever know if it was a real serious attempt, or if it was one of those dramatic attempts.”

Costello reveals it was his mother, Mac, Natalie’s live-in housekeeper, who called Norma Crane after finding Natalie overdosed, characterizing it as “a bid for attention. She was on Valium and Librium and God knows what else. She kept a good supply on hand.” Mac was also present for Natalie’s suicide attempt at the end of
The Great Race
, when she began to put a single gardenia, Natalie’s favorite flower, in a
shallow bowl beside her bed. “Most of the occasions were quietly hushed up. My mother would never discuss any details, even to me. My mother did say to me that all of the attempts were for attention and not in earnest, except for one occasion when Natalie cut herself, which was probably deep depression.”

Costello, who considered Natalie “delightful,” did not believe she wanted to die, “She loved life too much. She was a
brave
woman.” He and his mother, Mac, kept the overdose in early 1966 under wraps. “Her family had no idea. It was call a friend, come on over, discreetly head to the doctor. When in doubt, call Norma.”

Norma Crane, who had a brief, long-distance marriage to New Yorker Herb Sargent, lived across the freeway from Natalie and was frequently around, recalls Costello, who saw her skinny-dip with Natalie, possibly the only time Natalie went in her kidney-shaped pool. Scott Marlowe, who had introduced Crane to Natalie, felt, “Natalie, in a sense, used Norma as a mother—the mother she never really had. That’s how the relationship evolved—neither one really saying that was the reason, but it was. Norma was a very loving person and it fulfilled them, each for each other.”

Natalie’s overdose catalyzed her into drastic changes that winter, orchestrated by her analyst, whom she hoped could help her resurrect Natasha, the self she had lost at six to “Natalie Wood.”

“It was mainly a matter of getting to the point where I could say, ‘Hey, I’m not such a bad person to hang out with.’ I had a lot of monkeys to get off my back.”

At Dr. Lindon’s direction, Natalie banned Mud from her house on Bentley. Maria’s only contact with her daughter that winter was a package of publicity photos for fans that Mud received from Costello each week, to autograph as Natalie Wood.

Fahd’s visits to the house were restricted, and when he came, Natalie locked the bar. “She just didn’t like to see her father when he was drinking,” Costello declares. “When her father called, she would say, ‘Have you been drinking?’ ” Costello never saw Natalie drink more than an occasional glass of wine, and she became almost militant about alcohol. “She did not approve of
my
drinking.”

Natalie and her analyst came up with the idea she audit night classes at UCLA, taking subjects she was interested in as a child. By an
odd irony, one of her first assignments in her English Literature class was Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Natalie would recall, “That carried me right back to the classroom scene in
Splendor in the Grass
, where the teacher was reading the same poem.”

Typically, she went to extremes, listening to classical music by Sibelius “until I liked it,” quoting Prufrock, reading Thoreau, Kafka and Erich Fromm, studying art, collecting paintings by Bonnard, Courbet and Matisse, donating artifacts to UCLA. Hollywood columnists satirized Natalie, designating early 1966 as her “culture-vulture period,” missing the point that she was trying to learn, not impress; as her friend Robert Blake observed, “For Natalie it was life or death.”

“I really didn’t know how to
be
, other than acting,” she reflected. “I didn’t really know what pleased me. I sort of had to figure all that out.” Her secretary’s 1966 memory of Natalie, at home, is curled up, lost in a book, or listening to music. The articles about her in movie magazines then featured Natalie posing in her house, showing off rooms she decorated herself. She developed an obsession to star in
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
, about a girl who had lived in an imaginary world struggling to achieve reality with the help of a psychiatrist, another character that mirrored her life. It was the first of several projects related to mental illness that would captivate Natalie, another being actress Frances Farmer’s memoir,
Will There Really Be a Morning?

Natalie’s epiphany, in analysis, was that “Natalie Wood” may have craved stardom, but
she
always desired a family, the dream denied her when Mud banished Jimmy, forging their pact to make Natalie Wood a star. Her constant refrain was, “It took me ten years of analysis to help me find what I wanted.” When she talked to Olga now, Natalie would tell her married sister, who had three boys and an insurance broker husband who adored her,
“You’re
the lucky one.”

That March, Natalie re-met an analytical young actor who aspired to write plays, named Henry Jaglom, with whom she became intrigued in November, after an introduction at a summer party in Malibu. Jaglom, who studied with Strasberg and viewed Hollywood warily, fascinated Natalie as the sort of artistic maverick she had admired since Dean and Marlowe; while Natalie Wood, the movie star, resisted.

Jaglom witnessed the schism in Natalie’s personality early in their affair. When they were at her home, “she was this sweet, lovely girl—open and vulnerable and probing and curious.” If they went out in public, he noticed, she would put on her bracelet, and “she
became
somebody
else
. Sort of fake and formal, and had this
smile
.”

As “this unemployed actor kid” with strong political opinions, Jaglom was alternately excited and repelled by the “glittering, glowing, jeweled unreality” of the Old Hollywood parties Natalie was invited to attend, with guests like Rosalind Russell, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, Cary Grant, Van Johnson. He encouraged Natalie, who was only twenty-seven, to seek a younger crowd, visit The Actors Studio West, smoke pot. “Which, at that time, shocked Natalie. I actually introduced her to pot. Her reaction was the same as my mother: ‘It didn’t
do
anything.’ I didn’t smoke a
lot
of dope, it’s just that I was so anti-drinking at that point. I remember parties at Dean Martin’s house, dinner parties, and they all got totally loaded, and it was boring and stupid. And it was compounded by the fact that nobody paid attention to the fact that there was a war. They were talking about
tennis
games, and cutlery.”